Civil service: differentiated working week for divorced parents – a path that the government is considering

Will the work schedule of parent civil servants be adapted soon? Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is considering several ways to organize working hours in the administration, including one in particular: a differentiated week. The goal is to allow divorced parents to distribute their working days according to the weeks during which they are responsible for their children in alternating custody, La Tribune newspaper reported on Sunday.

The head of government, who had already started an experiment with a “four-day week” as part of public accounts last year when he was minister there, called on all other ministries at the end of January to do the same in “their central and decentralized centres”. administration. According to La Tribune, he will present a more precise roadmap to the executive branch in detail next week, on March 27, as part of a government seminar under the slogan “do better.”

Four or five days worked, depending on joint custody.

Gabriel Attal should then ask ministers to carry out an experiment in labor organization in their administrations by September, which will last between one and two years. There will be several options on the table: a four-day week, a four-day week or a differentiated week, which the Prime Minister is advocating. He wants to use the decision to allow divorced parents to work four days a week when their children are in their care, and vice versa five days in the weeks when they are not.

The plan will aim to respond to public aspirations at a time when polls show the four-day week appeals to most French people and companies are expanding their experiments. And also to revive the attractiveness of these professions and combat absenteeism.

Gabriel Attal, however, did not specify whether he plans to reduce the number of hours worked if the differentiated week option is chosen. This seems unlikely given the head of government’s recent statements: when giving instructions to ministers at the end of January, he insisted that the “four-day” working week does not include a “reduction in working hours.” . It would then be necessary to “arrive earlier in the morning and leave later in the evening to work one less day,” he summarized in his general political speech. So the goal would be to reduce five days of seven hours to four days of approximately nine hours.

Trade unions received this statement ambiguously: some of them opposed maintaining the previous number of working hours. “This is an intensification of working days, an expansion of amplitudes, it upsets the balance between professional and private life,” Mylène Jacquot, secretary general of the CFDT-Public Service, criticized Le Parisien.

“Gabriel Attal did not talk about reducing working hours, (…) we are going to intensify our work even more,” also reacted this Monday on Southern Radio environmentalist MP Sandrine Rousseau calls for “slowing down and taking your time”, “instead of pressing the gas pedal”.